I’m spanish, I know the spanish market, the spanish language and the spanish people a lot more than the english (or worldwide) people/market/language. So, why is an error for me to build my software only for the national market?

I know I’m narrowing my market, but for me is so dificult to go to another market…

As developers, we often complain about code quality, but I think that a lot of companies sacrifice code quality to get to market fastest and this can be a distinct competitive advantage. If your code works, nobody cares what it looks like. If you spend all of your time building a perfectly coded and scalable product, you can end up wasting a lot of time if it doesn’t take off.

Additionally, you’re definitely right, figuring out if there’s a market for your product and finding out how to promote it is probably the biggest challenge that you can ever face in software. Right now social media is huge with Facebook and its surrounding ecosystem of a ton of companies listed at http://buyfacebookfansreviews.com are how a lot of companies try and get traction, but there is definitely a ton of ways to promote different types of software. As a developer, going it alone is hard and having an experienced business guy that has experienced with promotion can be invaluable.

I’m not suggesting that you ignore your customers, but you should take what they say with a grain of salt and evaluate it thoroughly. Henry Ford had the famous quote where he said something like “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. Many people don’t know what they want until they see it: so you have to listen to people but use your own brain to try and solve problems and offer people an awesome experience. As an outsider to a market, you often have the ability to see inefficiencies that insiders don’t recognize and have the chance to really change the way people do things.

I guess that is the opposite of #11. Any third party software you don’t have the source for is a major risk. But I expect more products fail due to using ‘bleeding edge’ technology than ‘trailing edge’ technology.

Actually just reading the book now, although so far a lot of it seems to be the stuff we’ve been banding around for a while it really gets the brain cells firing & gave me the courage to chop of a lot of potential features out of my next v1.

One. Promote the hell out of your product prior to release, overtake the competition in SEO, garner a queue of eager testers and customers – and have a hick Magistrate whack a “cease-and-desist order” on you “pending action” for the offence of “stealing an idea” from a local.

Don’t laugh. I’ve four months into sorting that very mess out. Wouldn’t be a problem if it hadn’t come from a citizen/developer of my own country.

Oh… And yeah. *I know* you “can’t copyright an idea” – but as the saying goes “tell it to the judge”. I’ll win but it’ll be a financial mess before it’s done between the lawyers.

As humorous as some of the 13 points sound, they are quite true. Sadly, I can very well see myself guilty of half the points in this list. It’s a sort of wake up call for me. I feel like I want to take a nice print out of it and stick it on my wall, surely a few points will stick eventually :P

#8 is the most annoying one. It’s a hard one to beat. Fighting this one means changing the group of people that surround you (the other developers).

#1 Spend lots of money on banner advertising or Google Adwords and assume that this is good marketing. Large opportunity to waste money here.

#2 Be cynical about marketing and assume that because your customers are smart they don’t need marketing to – they think just like you and are skeptical of all marketing. WRONG! Of all people, smart people definitely need to be marketed to (not sold to, marketed to, there is a real difference).

Great list. I like number 8 and 11. It’s important to focus on technoclogy, coding standards, design patterns, etc…But not at the cost of giving the customer what they want, will use, or pay for. It seems too often developers don’t get that.